John Cuthber

It can also happens by accident. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning

(1) The biggest crooks are the bosses so it's hardly likely that they will do anything to stop themselves. (2) It's true that the treasury for many years had a very stupid policy of penalising anyone who didn't spend the whole of the budget. There's a reason for it involving the public sector borrowing requirement. Unfortunately, they forgot to take proper account of human behaviour when they came up with that policy. It is no longer in force where I work and I think it has been largely abandoned for some time now. (3) it is true that the government has reintroduced measures to stop the banks misbehaving in the way that caused the problem. What a pity they didn't realise that deregulating the banks in the first place was a bad idea.

Lets see what happened there Moontan says " Ivy Mike, a nuclear explosion released many tens of tons of radioactive debris to the earth's environment, how many tons did Fukushima release? I think a straight up comparison is relevant here.." Overtone says "the nuke people have hidden the relevant data about Ivy Mike " Moontan provides that data. Overtone moves the goalposts. "So? What were the actual exposure regimes (including the far flung ones more directly comparable with likely Fukushima exposures), involving which isotopes, and to what effects? " Why did he suddenly change tack there?

"Finally. So how many times did I have to repeat the fact that my vocabulary here is simply accurate? Ten? Fifteen? Something like that" http://www.thefreedictionary.com/apologist " Repetition will not change that fact."

Heretic! How dare you deny miracles?

Sorry, can you clarify something there. When you say " I've seen from close quarters blatant fraud and sabotage, with nothing done for the clear reason of publicity should it go to court." do you mean in the public or private sectors- because there are plenty of examples of both. If you are looking for current evidence of sabotage by public employees I think the refuals to agree a budget proposed by the elected president might count. "Sorry, but I can't take comments about the wonders of public ownership. " Not much to do with Greece I know, but, compare and contrast healthcare spending in the US vs UK then compare the mean lifespans, the infant mortality... "I seem to recall the last UK PM eulogising about a particular bank when opening a new branch (I think he was still chancellor at the time, I have the statement somewhere in my files, but can't find it). Even intimating that he would like to be able to run the UK economy like they run their bank! And what happened? That bank when bust and nearly brought the world economy down!! And that political party was elected into government three times!!" Please look it up, it sounds interesting. At the moment we have a Prime minister who just sold a bank back to the private sector. It had to be taken into public ownership because the private sector messed it up. Under public sector ownership, it made a profit. So now he has sold it back to his rich friends. That's the sort of mechanism they use for "risk management" They privatise the profits, but the public takes the risk for any losses. Nice work if you can get it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24117531

Why are the events at Fukushima described as a problem? I may be mistaken, but I think that it is seen as a problem because it exposes people to risk. Surely one of the most important aspects of the "continuing problems" is "how big a problem is it?" Now, in principle it's possible to produce an estimated contour plot of diminished life expectancy round the area (and covering the whole world). But that's a pig of a research project. Surely it's easier- and just as informative to compare it against other, better known- risks? It's possible that, had I just posted data on the relative scales of the radioactive emissions from Fukushima and, for example TMI or Chernobyl, nobody would have taken offence at that. It's not an unreasonable comparison- and it would provide information clearly and directly related to the thread's title. Continuing problems... How big are these problems? X % of the risk produced by Chernobyl. But, I chose to compare it to a non nuclear risk (Not initially- but later). And now, I'm suddenly accused of being a "nuclear apologist". Worse, My potty-mouthed accuser refuses to even point out relevant errors in the work I cited (it's not my work- I have no emotional attachment to it). The really strange thing is that the word apologist isn't derogatory- it just means someone who defends a position. Well, I'm defending 2but I'm rather more concerned about one than the other. I'm defending the nuclear industry from being painted as a bogeyman. But my main point,and the reason I'm defending nuclear power is that I'm defending science. I have put forward data. That data may well be from utterly biassed sources. Biassed sources are not necessarily wrong. I'm sure that, with a little effort, I could find websites just as deeply slanted- but the other way. By Overtone's logic I can write them off as BS just because they are biassed. But that's absurd. One side or the other has to be correct, or at least, more nearly correct. There really must be a ratio of people killed by coal to people killed by nuclear power. Overtone's refusal to look at the data guarantees that he will never find out what that ratio is and, by extension, how big a problem this thread is about.

Marie Curie managed to live 67 years in spite of uncontrolled exposure to not just polonium but a range of other nasty materials. I strongly suspect that you could do the work and survive with the sort of precautions taken with some of the nastier industrial pesticides. (getting away with poisoning someone would be more of a problem) And the sad truth is that plenty of people out there don't care about dying for their "cause". Why do you think it matters who wrote that quote, or what their qualifications are?

The context of your comment was "The question is that on a global scale, governments are asked to reduce their impact. More an more privatizations, lower budgets, less employees, less army, etc." from michel123456 What on earth has that got to do with trades becoming redundant following emergence of new techniques?

So, since I can quote this from a book, presumably you now believe in a wizard called Harry Potter. "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as shes pent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere." (That's not my work, BTW, it's cribbed from J K Rowling.)

"Can doctors explain how i am feeling on a machine at a given point of time?" Not yet, but they are working on it with things like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging

Ture, but it works quite well for a lot of them. The fruit of the banana has no seeds and is sterile I think it's entirely derived genetically from the parent tree. You can use complicated cell culture techniques but it's very fiddly so it's expensive. But, when it comes down to it, people have been cloning plants for ages, for exactly the sorts of reasons you suggested.

Neurosurgeons can make mistakes and it's also true that his ability to use a scalpel carefully is no reason to believe in his philosophical viewpoint.

It might be better if you didn't spend a lot of time contemplating a document which says "as temperatures have declined and climate models have failed to predict this decline, the IPCC has gained confidence in catastrophic warming and dismisses the pause as unpredictable climate variability" because the temperatures are not actually declining (unless you "coincidentally" choose to compare them to the highest value ever recorded).

"I think you will find that however far you go back in time that always has been the case" I don't. I think that post WWII there was an increase in government spending in real terms- the setting up of the NHS and the rest of the welfare state. That lasted, roughly, until the election of the Tory government in the late 70s. From 1960 to 1980 UK GDP rose from about $70B to $540B A 7.7 fold increase over 20 years. If that carried on it would give $4.2T by 2000 Then the Tories got in and it fell to about 440B over the course of 5 years. It picked up a bit but by 2000 it had reached $1.5T "As I believe Churchill said: democracy is a terrible way to run a country, but better that all the others." So, for example, democracy is better than plutocracy. "It was totally and absolutely democratic." Is it a democracy if those seeking power deliberately mislead the population?

Take glycine as an example (because I can remember it's structure without looking it up) It's generally called aminoethanoic acid. If you wanted to call it (something)ethylamine what would you put in the brackets there? But, essentially, it's just convention.

Interesting graph. They have plotted the temperature anomaly, rather than the temperature. What the graph shows is that the temperature has risen in every year since 1993. The model is slightly overestimating how fast it's getting hotter- but hotter is still what it is getting. So, why would they use that particular choice of variable to illustrate their article? Perhaps because it distorts what people see. If the temperature were rising slowly by say 1 degree every ten years, that graph would look flat. People would look at it and they might think that the temperature was flat ie there was no warming. Why did they go to the trouble of producing a misleading graph by taking the first derivative of the data? I don't know- I haven't asked them. But I wonder if it was because they wanted a graph that misleads people. If you are going to show a plot of rate of change of temperature, shouldn't you say that in the headline?

Probably every banana you have eaten is pretty much a clone. They are reproduced commercially by cuttings. And they are not expensive.

Even if it settled to a new equilibrium (It might- the sphere would heat up and emit more) there's little doubt it hastens the death of the star. Once the fuel is used up the star goes out. If it's producing more power it will get through the fuel quicker.

OK, let's have yet another look at the data http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/28476-objective-global-warming/page-5 There's a glitch in '96. Choosing it as your datum so you can say "Global Temperature peaked in 1995-1996. Since then it has been getting lower or no movement" is blatant cherry picking. And, even when you cherry pick, you can't get round the fact that, since '96, most years have been warmer than the 20 years prior to that glitch. At best, you might have shown that the warming has (for some reason) slowed down a bit-compared to a particularly hot year.

" They aren't. Everyone here, me included, has been very clear and direct on that point. " Really, what are you doing to change the way coal is handled? If, as I suspect, the answer is "nothing" then you have in fact accepted it and so you must consider it acceptable. Anyway, perhaps it would be informative if you were to find numbers, do the calculation yourself, and post the results here. Can you estimate the deaths per TWHr from coal and nuclear power. (And it is relevant, whether you like it or not)

You forgot to answer this If you know that (at least) some police tell lies, can you trust a police report? It's a simple matter of "yes" or "no". (actually it's a simple matter of "no" really. Without other evidence you can't trust it) My next question would be : what use is a police report if you can't trust it? I think the answer is "not much" That's why society takes a very dim view of bent coppers. (On the other hand, we pretty much expect the newspapers to lie to us) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Starr#.22Freddie_Starr_ate_my_hamster.22 The reason why we are particularly annoyed about dishonest police is that they are in a position of authority and trust. But a lying one undermines the whole system. Now, consider some collection of scriptures that's known to have errors. Scripture ought to have a far higher level of trust than the police (in much the same way that the police should be more trustworthy than the papers). So, if it's known to be wrong, is it any use? If so, what use is it?

Photons are very objective, if they haven't enough energy they don't do the job.

From this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heat_of_Vaporization_(Benzene%2BAcetone%2BMethanol%2BWater).png Near room temperature the heat of evaporation of water is about 44KJ/mole According to this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_per_mole That's about 0.5 eV per molecule Which corresponds to a wavelength of about 2.4 microns But the radiation they are talking about has a wavelength in the range 8 to 14 microns. So it simply doesn't have enough energy to evaporate the water except if a bunch of photons are absorbed and their collective energy is used to drive the evaporation. That's called heating up. And I don't care who says otherwise, even if it's on the BBC, if the energy isn't there- it doesn't happen. Direct evaporation by shorter wavelength IR or visible light is possible- but that's not the range these guys are talking about.

Oh, it's also worth noting that, particularly with alpha emitters, they are not very well stuck down to the substrate " so they are very difficult to break free". Even a layer of varnish over them would seriously reduce the alpha intensity. The alpha emitter is a very thin, fragile layer on the top.